starlady | AMVs versus vids (Can o' worms? Check! Can opener? Check! Let's rock and roll!)

So I gave

were_duck a list of AMV recs for the Vid Party she and

damned_colonial are organizing at WisCon (I'm so excited, seriously). And as part of that I watched a lot of AMVs in a very short time span, which I haven't done in forever, and which caused me to say this in reply to

lian's post on original versus fan works. And then both of them asked me, more or less, for my thoughts on AMVs versus vids.

Here's

were_duck 's question:

I'm getting the sense from the few amvs that I've seen that there are significant differences between vids and amvs, but I don't really have the language to express what that is other than just saying that they come from different subcultures/traditions. Care to share your thoughts on the subject?

So let me repost my reply:

Hmm. Well, I can say a few things, certainly. I guess the first thing is that AMVs have come a long way from their VCR to VHS origins in the late 80s/early 90s, as I imagine vids have (when did vidding become a thing? same time? earlier? later?); the VHS AMVs that were made with access to professional-grade equipment still stand up, but they fit on the low end of the...hmm...technicality spectrum now.

The thing I notice over and over again is that AMVs abhor lipflap. Seriously, if there's one thing that'll get you flamed as an utter noob in AMV circles it's lipflap. Conversely, lip syncing done well is a real ideal of the genre. Whereas, in most vids I've seen the attitude seems to be that lipflap happens and you've just got to deal with it.

The other thing I notice is that, particularly in the last three-four years, AMVs have become feats of video editing and digital clip creation achievement. That one I linked above, "The Running Man", epitomizes this trend--there isn't a single frame of that video that hasn't been digitally retouched in some way, and a good chunk of it is original animation (actually, remind me to dig up the link to this one Death Note AMV I saw last year that has even more original animation). So the end result is this amalgamation of transformed and original content in a transformative practice that ends up somewhere in between the two, in terms of impact, I think. Whereas most vids I've seen are almost wholly using transformed content, and in terms of aim they are usually engaging directly with the source fandom, whether as critique or meta discussion or story-telling. The AMVs that are most popular these days, by contrast, tend to be multi-anime, and tend to have sheer spectacle as their purpose. Even when an AMV uses a single anime and an obviously relevant song (I'm thinking of this Soul Eater AMV here), it tends not to tell a story so much as harp on a trope. Actually, if you take a look at the 2010 Viewers' Choice Awards on animemusicvideos.org, you can see this made clear in the categories: Storytelling and No Effects get their own particular categories because they're the exception, not the rule.

A lot of this is just, I think, fairly deterministic in that it can be chalked up to the nature of the footage that vidders have available to them, respectively. I don't really think it's possible to make a multi-TV fandom dance vid, for example, but damn straight you can make some awesome multi-anime dance AMVs.

Apparently Francesca Coppa wrote an article about AMVs versus vids at one point, but I haven't read it, or so lian says here.

You'll note that my reply doesn't actually say much about the nature of vids, because I am still very much a noob when it comes to vids. I have probably seen two dozen total in my lifetime (sad, I know!)--whereas I personally have made 15 AMVs, and have inchoate plans for a lot more (and I should note, I am very much an old school AMV person, one who thinks primarily in terms of single-anime AMVs and has neither the plans nor the desire to become one of the technical wizards). So what do you think of my thoughts, vidders? Am I terribly wrong and just don't know it? And if I am, then where?

ETA: Thanks to

wistfuljane, have two hilarious posts by

thefourthvine addressing this question from a vidder's perspective: Anime Vids for Media Fans, and The AMV Feedback Project: Reaching New Heights of Obsession!.

I should probably actually write up a bit of description for each of those recs I posted, shouldn't I? *sigh*

ETA 2: Here are my AMV recs, with explanations!

ETA 3: One final related post!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

just jumping in here quickly (am on my late late way to wooork!) to say that yeah, Coppa never wrote anything about AMV vs. vids, but about Women, Star Trek, and the early development of fannish vidding, which makes a pretty focused (maybe too focused) argument about vids, I think, and to second

were_duck's comment -- surely there is some academic treatment of AMVs somewhere (and if yes, I'm sure you're the person to ask? :D), but what I'd really love to see would be a contrastive discussion of AMVs vs. vids. <3

See, I deliberately tried not to be too contrastive here, since what I know about vids would fit in a thimble and then I'd just have people saying "You're wrong!" and rightly so. But maybe I went too far the other way?

I know of no academic discussion of AMVs, but this might be a question for the AMRL. Off to write an email, then.

Mimi Ito (Mizuko Ito) has started doing some work on anime video. Her closing plenary talk from a conference recently is posted here: http://www.itofisher.com/mito/publications/amateur_media_p_1.html

The AMV part is towards the end. (Ironically, I was in grad school with her, and we are out of touch - I was a vidder then, and she probably has no idea she's seen some of my fan vidding.)

Thanks for that link! I added it to the third post above.

AMVs versus vids (Can o' worms? Check! Can opener? Check! Let's rock and roll!)

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Academic AMV work

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